


watch my heart of stone melt into clay (in your hands)

by Anonymous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animagus, Not Canon Compliant - Movie 2: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Pratchettian "Borrowing", Spleenfanon Against The Crimes of Grindelwald, Timeline may vary from the HP books, brief reference to Chernobyl, casts Dumbledore as profoundly unreliable narrator with an Agenda, probable inaccuracies re Eastern Europe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 20:04:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16374161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: It's not Quirrell that finally finds the remnants of Tom Riddle in Eastern Europe.





	watch my heart of stone melt into clay (in your hands)

**Author's Note:**

> ...title from the early 90s Over the Rhine song "Ubiquitous Hands"

Getting your own, dare he say half-hearted, killing curse in the face is...a trip, as they say. Knocks him for an idiomatic loop, and the rebound of magic is like ice cold light between a set of two mirrors that eventually ...escapes, more like the old corpuscle theories, with a crack, a little crater in the glass with spiderweb breaks surrounding it. 

So. That hadn't been successful in the least. The first time he killed, he had viscerally hated the victim and he'd still thrown up afterwards. He's gotten better about that, inured to it, but while it may be human instinct to lash out at your enemies, babies honestly oughtn't be admissible as enemies.

It felt like the glass (or was it ice?) of his magic was teetering on a precipice, about to shatter. Time to get out of here; destruction might be in his plans but incarceration was not.

He didn't dislike Eastern Europe, all the little satellites of the Soviet Union. A convenient and obscure, magically, place to hide out. And so there he headed, with the last of his magical power for the time being.

* * *

And it seems failed and somehow reflected Avadas have significant side effects. Like getting reduced to a magical essence, removed from body (which seems, like mushroom clouds and the sun itself, to have obeyed Einstein-yes, he does know, though not a lot, about that-and disincorporated into energy.)

But—he can share the heads of animals. The hawk is hard, and eating raw rabbit revulses him, so he lets that go and sticks to mice, squirrels, and songbirds. Insects present less difficulty, somehow, when bird shaped. 

He has only the vaguest sense of years passing and cannot will his magic into doing much. On the wings of a humble sparrow he passed over fields and a river and finds an abandoned Muggle city. A mystery, with a massive metal structure nearby, and a Ferris wheel. A sign says Припять, which he can't quite read (should have learned the language, Tom!) but seems meaningless to him. Only when he starts trying, experimentally, to weave a spell and the magic pulses and throbs with danger does he reconsider and flee.

Despite the danger, seeing the abandoned village makes him want human company, even if he is half feral from the influence of his crawling and flying hosts. This is a puzzle with no clear solution; he is a Dark Lord with no corporeal body, and he proposes to want company?!

* * *

And then comes an American with a parrot, into a little town he doesn't know and the prospect of having a voice again is, naturally, irresistible...


End file.
